The Lovels of Arden by Mary Elizabeth Braddon (ebook offline reader txt) 📕

singing ballads of a narrative character, every verse embellished with a curious old-fashioned quavering turn.

After this refreshment--the first that Clarissa had taken with any approach to appetite since that luckless scene in her brother's painting-room--Jane persuaded her mistress to lie down and rest, which she did, falling asleep peacefully, with her boy's bright young head nestling beside her on the pillow. It was nearly dark when she awoke; and after dinner she went out for a walk with Austin, in the bright gas-lit streets, and along a wide boulevard, where the tall bare trees looked grim in the darkness. The freedom of this new life seemed strange to her, after the forms and ceremonies of her position as Daniel Granger's wife, and Sophia Granger's stepmother--strange, and not at all unpleasant.

"I think I could be very happy with you and Bessie always, Austin," she said, "if they would only leave me in peace."

"Could you, Clary? I'm sure I should be very glad to have you; but it would be rather hard upon Granger."

"He was going to take me back to papa; he wanted to get rid of me."

"He was in a passion when he talked about that, rely upon it."

"He was as cold as ice, Austin. I don't believe he was ever in a passion in his life."

* * * * *


CHAPTER XLV.


TEMPTATION.

It was Sunday; and Clarissa had been nearly a week in Brussels--a very quiet week, in which she had had nothing to do but worship her baby, and tremblingly await any attempt that might be made to wrest him from her. She lived in hourly fear of discovery, and was startled by every step on the staircase and fluttered by every sudden opening of a door, expecting to see Daniel Granger on the threshold.

She went to church alone on this first Sunday morning. Austin was seldom visible before noon, dawdling away the bleaker morning hours smoking and reading in bed. Bessie had a world of domestic business on her hands, and the two boys to torment her while she attempted to get through it. So Clarissa went alone to St. Gudule. There were Protestant temples, no doubt, in the Belgian city wherein she might have worshipped; but that solemn pile drew her to itself with a magnetic attraction. She went in among the gay-looking crowd--the old women in wondrous caps, the sprinkling of soldiers, the prosperous citizens and citizenesses in their Sunday splendour--and made her way to a quiet corner remote from the great carved-oak pulpit and the high altar--a shadowy corner behind a massive cluster of columns, and near a little wooden door in one of the great portals, that opened and shut with a clanging noise now and then, and beside which a dilapidated-looking old man kept watch over a shell-shaped marble basin of holy water, and offered a brush dipped in the sacred fluid to devout passers-by. Here she could kneel unobserved, and in her ignorant fashion, join in the solemn service, lifting up her heart with the elevation of the host, and acknowledging her guiltiness in utter humility of spirit.

Yet not always throughout that service could she keep her thoughts from wandering. Her mind had been too much troubled of late for perfect peace or abstraction of thought to be possible to her. The consideration of her own folly was very constantly with her. What a wreck and ruin she had made of her life--a life which from first to last had been governed by impulse only!

"If I had been an honourable woman, I should never have married Daniel Granger," she said to herself. "What right had I to take so much and give so little--to marry a man I could not even hope to love for the sake of winning independence for my father, or for the sake of my old home?"

Arden Court--was not that the price which had made her sacrifice tolerable to her? And she had lost it; the gates of the dwelling she loved were closed upon her once again--and this time for ever. How the memory of the place came back to her this chill March morning!--the tall elms rocking in the wind, the rooks' nests tossing in the topmost branches, and the hoarse cawing of discontented birds bewailing the tardiness of spring.

"It will be my darling's home in the days to come," she said to herself; but even this thought brought no consolation. She dared not face her son's future. Would it not involve severance from her? Now, while he was an infant, she might hold him; but by-and-by the father's stern claim would be heard. They would take the boy away from her--teach him to despise and forget her. She fancied herself wandering and watching in Arden Park, a trespasser, waiting for a stolen glimpse of her child's face.

"I shall die before that time comes," she thought gloomily.

Some such fancy as this held her absorbed when the high mass concluded, and the congregation began to disperse. The great organ was pealing out one of Mozart's Hallelujahs. There was some secondary service going on at either end of the church. Clarissa still knelt, with her face hidden in her hands, not praying, only conjuring up dreadful pictures of the future. Little by little the crowd melted away; there were only a few worshippers murmuring responses in the distance; the last chords of the Hallelujah crashed and resounded under the vaulted roof; and at last Clarissa looked up and found herself almost alone.

She went out, but shrank from returning immediately to her child. Those agitating thoughts had affected her too deeply. She walked away from the church up towards the park, hoping to find some quiet place where she might walk down the disturbance in her mind, so as to return with a calm smiling face to her darling. It was not a tempting day for any purposeless pedestrian. The sky had darkened at noon, and there was a drizzling rain coming down from the dull gray heavens. The streets cleared quickly now the services were over; but Clarissa went on, scarcely conscious of the rain, and utterly indifferent to any inconvenience it might cause her.

She was in the wide open place near the park, when she heard footsteps following her, rapidly, and with a purpose, as it seemed. Some women have a kind of instinct about these things. She knew in a moment, as if by some subtle magnetism, that the man following her was George Fairfax.

"Clarissa," said a voice close in her ear; and turning quickly, she found herself face to face with him.

"I was in the church," he said, "and have followed you all the way here. I waited till we were clear of the narrow streets and the crowd. O, my darling, thank God I have found you! I only knew yesterday that you had left Paris; and some happy instinct brought me here. I felt sure you would come to Austin. I arrived late last night, and was loafing about the streets this morning, wondering how I should discover your whereabouts, when I turned a corner and saw you going into St. Gudule. I followed, but would not disturb your orisons, fair saint. I was not very far off, Clarissa--only on the other side of the pillar."

"Was it kind of you to follow me here, Mr. Fairfax?" Clarissa asked gravely. "Have you not brought enough trouble upon me as it is?"

"Brought trouble upon you! Yes, that seems hard; but I suppose it was my fate to do that, and to make amends for it afterwards, dearest, in a life that shall know no trouble."

"I am here with my son, Mr. Fairfax. It was the fear of being separated from him that drove me away from Paris. If you have one spark of generous feeling, you will not pursue me or annoy me here. If my husband were to see us together, or were to hear of our being seen together, he would have just grounds for taking my child away from me."

"Clarissa," exclaimed George Fairfax, with intensity, "let us make an end of all folly and beating about the bush at once and for ever. I do not say that I am not sorry for what happened the other night--so far as it caused annoyance to you--but I am heartily glad that matters have been brought to a crisis. The end must have come sooner or later, Clary--so much the better if it has come quickly. There is only one way to deal with the wretched mistake of your marriage, and that is to treat it as a thing that has never been. There are places enough in the world, Clary, in which you and I are nameless and unknown, and we can be married in one of those places. I will run all risks of a criminal prosecution and seven, years at Portland. You shall be my wife, Clarissa, by as tight a knot as Church and State can tie."

She looked at him with a half scornful smile.

"Do you think you are talking to a child?" she said.

They had been standing in the chill drizzling rain all this time, unconscious, and would have so stood, perhaps, if a shower of fire and brimstone had been descending upon Brussels. But at this juncture Mr. Fairfax suddenly discovered that it was raining, and that Clarissa's shawl was growing rapidly damper.

"Good heavens!" he exclaimed, "what a brute I am. I must find you some kind of shelter."

There was a café near at hand, the café attached to the Théâtre du Pare, with rustic out-of-door constructions for the accommodation of its customers. Mr. Fairfax conducted Clarissa to one of these wooden arbours, where they might remain till the rain was over, or till he chose to bring her a carriage. He did not care to do that very soon. He had a great deal to say to her. This time he was resolved not to accept defeat.

A solitary waiter espied them promptly, having so little to do in this doleful weather, and came for orders. Mr. Fairfax asked for some coffee, and waited in silence while the man brought a little tray with cups and saucers and a great copper coffee-pot, out of which he poured the black infusion with infinite flourish.

"Bring some cognac," said Mr. Fairfax; and when the spirit had been brought, he poured half a wine-glassful into a cup of coffee, and entreated Clarissa to drink it as an antidote to cold.

"You were walking ever so long in the rain," he said.

She declined the nauseous dose.

"I am not afraid of catching cold," she said; "but I shall be very glad if you will let that man fetch me a fly. I ought to have been at home half an hour ago."

"At home! Is it permissible to ask where you live?"

"I would rather not tell you my address. I hope, if my being here had anything to with your coming to Brussels, that you will go back to Paris at once."

"I shall never go back to Paris unless I enter its gates with you some day. I am going to the East, Clary; to Constantinople, and Athens, and all the world of fable and story, and you are going with me--you and young Lovel. Do you know there is one particular spot in the island of